#ego

The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile. ↗

— Alan Watts

#efforts #egos #feel #futile #his

Police in China can do whatever they want; after 81 days in arbitrary detention you clearly realise that they don't have to obey their own laws. In a society like this there is no negotiation, no discussion, except to tell you that power can crush you any time they want - not only you, your whole family and all people like you. ↗

— Ai Weiwei

#any #arbitrary #china #clearly #crush

I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#forgiveness #immorality #redemption #religion #responsibility

Some great people are leaders and others are more lucky, in the right place at the right time. I'd put myself in the latter category. But I'd never call myself a normal designer of anything. ↗

— Steve Wozniak

#call #category #designer #great #great people

Material blessings, when they pay beyond the category of need, are weirdly fruitful of headache. ↗

— Philip Wylie

#blessings #category #fruitful #headache #material

Awareness requires a rupture with the world we take for granted; then old categories of experience are called into question and revised. ↗

— Shoshana Zuboff

#called #categories #experience #granted #into

A lot of things are inherent in life -change, birth, death, aging, illness, accidents, calamities, and losses of all kinds- but these events don't have to be the cause of ongoing suffering. Yes, these events cause grief and sadness, but grief and sadness pass, like everything else, and are replaced with other experiences. The ego, however, clings to negative thoughts and feelings and, as a result, magnifies, intensifies, and sustains those emotions while the ego overlooks the subtle feelings of joy, gratitude, excitement, adventure, love, and peace that come from Essence. If we dwelt on these positive states as much as we generally dwell on our negative thoughts and painful emotions, our lives would be transformed. ↗

— Gina Lake

#essence #grief #loss #positive-thinking #recovery